Many industrial automation and control applications involve geographically distributed sensors and actuators, which are typically connected to a central control room through wired networks. It is sometimes possible to reduce the amount of wiring through the use of wireless communications to and from the control room. While achieving some customer benefit (such as wiring reduction), this approach often does not solve the problem of fault tolerance required by closed-loop control applications. It also typically requires long-distance communications from the sensors to the control room and then back to the actuators, resulting in reduced reliability and added control latency.